Credits ...

Throughout this site I have used other peoples work. I hope that I have mainly used their material for inspiration, rather than flagrantly copying it - I'll leave that for you to decide.

Below are those who I think deserve a mention for their contribution. If you're not on the list, and think that you should be, then post me a message on the message board and I will see about adding you. If you think that no amount of text can justify my theft of your material, then post me a message on the message board and I will see about removing it.

Matt Claydon convinced me that it wasn't neccesary to be a genius like him to write HTML, and that it was much better to write HTML than have some wysiwyg editor write you some bloat script that still does not do what you want. I nicked a lot of general ideas from the site that Matt put together for the Southern Indoor Bouldering League, including one of my site's most popular features - the message board.

The Pixel Pen is the site that I first used to teach myself HTML, before I even had any content to go on a site. The site has now been removed because the owner felt that it was too out of date - all that it had was basic HTML, no CSS or fancy Java. For a while I used the background lined paper image from this site on mine.

Pagetutor was the site I turned to to refresh my HTML when I finally decided that I had enough content (or potential content, with Sophie on the way) to justify putting a Family web page up. I liked the site's no-nonsense, lets get a page together with the minimum of fuss approach. Also, the free tutorials are all downloadable as one zipped file, and there are links to some really useful free stuff like EzThumbnail creator and NoteTab.

Next I started to look at what else I could do with the pages to make the content more interesting. First off a hit counter (Matt's SIBL site showed the way again) from Fastcounter. Then from the site that provides my message board, Boards 2 Go came a link to a source of free animated GIF files at CyberGifs. The ink blot logo came from searching Google for images, it was used on KamikazeEd.

I remembered a site run by a guy who used to work at my place that had lots of GIFs and stuff moving around, so I popped over to The Chilihouse. While I was there I stole the script for the scrolling Philosopher's song, and started looking seriously at Javascript.

Looking at the scripts on The Chilihouse I saw that Andy had used Dynamic Drive and JavaScript Kit as sources, so I went there too and started looking and things like picture slideshows.

After a while the website started to stagnate. I had played about a bit with JavaScript, but felt that is was best used sparingly. I had ideas for new content for the site to make it into a more useful reference source for our family and friends, and not so focussed on updates about Sophie. These ideas were going to be difficult to implement given the way that I had set up the original site. Also, my knowledge / awareness of web design had moved on in the year that I had been running the site - it was time for a major overhaul.

Having decided that I would re-write the site I canvassed opinion about extra content from friends and family who used the site. The response was positive - Girth summed up the aim of the new site best as a magazine for friends and family, with features that they would find interesting. The next question was how to do it. I knew that I could put together a better site than the old one, but I was unsure how. James (no, not Girth!) pointed me at cascading style sheets (CSS) a technique for controlling the layout of web pages that I was aware of but knew nothing about. Fortunately James also pointed at W3 Schools, an excellent tutorial / reference site.

Next I searched the web for some advice on how to use CSS to lay out a page. I found a good introduction to the layout possibilities at the CSS page of Glish.com, together with a whole load of CSS links. From here I decided to give myself a head start by using a CSS template from the layout reservoir at BlueRobot. This gave me my first introduction to dealing with different browsers, and how the interpret HTML and CSS differently to each other (say hello to hacked CSS).

Decided to add a little dynamic content, in the form of some snippets of javascript culled from the javascript vault at Ur I.T. Mate Group (a great source of all sorts of free stuff).

As I finished the first "draft" of the site I thought that I had done a pretty good job of writing "correct" code, so I decided to use the validation facilities at W3C (the people who set internet standards) to see how well I had done. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had only done a couple of things that were not considered "proper" markup, and I resolved to make sure all of my future pages validated too.

Loading more content into the new layout I came across more problems with the way that the pages were displaying - this was despite making sure that I had written pages that conformed to the standards! The problems were due to yet more bugs in the way that Micro$oft Internet Explorer renders web pages - with total disregard to the standards. In the end I found a good explanation of the problems that I was seeing, together with solutions and work-arounds at "Position Is Everything".

The last of the tables were removed from my design by using lists (even horizontally) as demonstrated at css.Maxdesign.

There followed a period of relative quiet, during which time I installed SP2 for Windows XP. Although the installation went without a hitch I was left feeling that after all of the hype surrounding SP2 not much had changed. I knew that I ought to check out how the site looked in other browsers anyway, so I installed the new "Firefox" browser from Mozilla. Similar enough to IE to be easy for a long time IE user like me to pick up, but with some great features too (and without the security weaknesses of IE). So far - I like it a lot. Interestingly, parts of the web site did not look too good in Firefox - it turned out that some of my layout relied on Internet Explorer's bugs to work! The problems were fixed quickly enough though.